J2SE

Always thought that the Hash implementations (table & map) used buckets that are prime in number. But recently, after digging around the source code to see what that default size resulted in a bit of a puzzling situation...
So let me start with a bit of rambling of my understanding about hashtables. They are created by using a hashing function to hash the keys into buckets along with...

Welcome to my blog! I would like to invite you to take a look
at the just released
Multi-Tasking Virtual Machine.
The actual technology has proven relatively easy to implement and
the original release was planned for early 2005. Well, so much
for the plans. A whole bunch of items crept in, all the way from
legal issue to handling large code releases on java.net. I guess for a while
my replies to...

I'm working on the 4th edition of The Java Programming Language,
and everyone of course has heard of the major new features. One of the
odd little corners, though, is that Unicode has now grown beyond a
16 bit character standard, and so has lots of interesting new
complications. Trivially, every method in the Character
class that asks about a char now has an overload to which
you can pass an...

For a long time, J2SE supporters like myself have said that the big win of J2SE is not only that you "run everywhere" today, but that future Java-capable platforms could pick up and run your software on day one. This would be a great reason to write J2SE applications, and a great reason for platforms to build in Java support.
Well, three new platforms made their public debut last week:...

Pat has filed a JSR to standarize
BeanShell. Ask any lisp (or smalltalk or ... even just plain emacs elisp) developer - interpreters are really really handy to have around, even when you also have a compiler. Standarizing BeanShell should also help it continue to make an impact in the education community.
Welcome to the JCP, Pat! Hope you enjoy it.

Sun executives are delivering a consistent message all across the world: Community involvement in Mustang. See recent pitches by Jeff Jackson and Graham Hamilton on this topic.
Jeff Jackson, Sun Microsystems Vice-President for Java Developer Platform and Strategy, was at the Sun Tech days in Bangalore yesterday. He invited developer community to actively participate in Mustang development....

I've received numerous emails asking me about my thoughts on the apache Harmony project and what does it really mean. It seems like everyone else has had their 2 cents so here is mine.
Now, not to keep you in suspense, yes, I believe it is a good thing. Infact I would like to see more developer goodwill from Sun but I'll get to that later.
The J2SE 5.0 TCK terms opened the door for other Java...

The kind folks at Software Development Times asked me to write
an article on
the future directions for the Java platform. This has now
surfaced in
their May 15th edition as
Evolving the Java Platform.
This includes some thoughts on the planned directions
for Mustang, Dolphin, and J2EE 5.0.
They also broke out a separate short article on
Increasing Transparency: Project Peabody
which...

Kudos to Dion for being the first I've seen to point this out. Says he:
Interestingly, it seems like it was lead by good 'ole Geir Magnusson.
Maybe nothing was read into that when the proposal came out. But now, Geir is an IBMer.
With the acquisition of Gluecode, GM Jr. now works for IBM. Should Harmony succeed--and as Dion points out, IBM certainly has the IP for that to happen--what becomes...

I recently submitted a bug through the Jira bug tracking software and I noticed a reference to bug voting. hmm bug voting, I remember that. It is also in bugzilla too, I trawled through the history of bugzilla voting and it mentions revzilla but even that doesn't extend that far back. I googled for more but drew a blank.
So where did this all come from? I would like to vote that it was a Java...

Date: April 9, 2005. Location: Pirenopolis, a small city in the center of Brazil. In a bucolic countryside, hours away from any major urban area, with cold waterfalls and butterflies using our hats as landing pads. Clumsy trying to climb our way trough this beautiful landscape, employees from companies like Sun and IBM; professors of some of Brazil's largest universities; hackers from Kaffe,...

This blog entry should really be titled, "J2SE 5.0 updates, or the lack of them". I've read Graham's blog entry about J2SE 5.0 updates a couple of times now and I still don't understand why you wouldn't want to push out minor updates via the consumer java.com website. The end result of this is that J2SE 5.0 Update 2 is available from java.com, while Update 3 is available from the java.sun.com...

In my last blog I mentioned we're nearly done with the baseline
API for mustang. In verifying the baseline API work I initially
took the approach of grabbing screenshots, dumping them in Paint and
zooming in. Painful to say the least! There must be a better way.
Enter Robot
In addition to being able to inject mouse and keyboard events into the
system java.awt.Robot gives you the ability...

Hurrah, Youppie, Yes, Great, ..
Today, I received my Examination Score Report where it's indicated that I am now a Sun Certified J2SE 5.0 Programmer.
I passed the exam the 1st February 2005.
Normally, we know directly, at the end of the exam, if we success or not, if we are certified or not.
But, in this case, it was not the case. I had to wait until today to know my results.
And I am now a Sun...

J2SE 5.0 Update 3 went out today, so I wanted
to share a few notes on what is happening with the Tiger update
releases.
The Update Release Process
The update releases are intended to each deliver a small
number of important bugfixes between our major releases.
We have now delivered three updates for Tiger: Update 1 had
124 fixes, Update 2 had 117 fixes and Update 3 has 79 fixes.
For...

In many of the past Swing team brainstorming sessions we've lamented
the layout process. Layout managers are a necessary evil of cross
platform layout and resolution independence in that they allow
components to adjust in size and position based on external criteria.
Unfortunately the existing layout managers are not the easiest thing
to use and force the developer to write code that can be...

In JMF, wherefor art thou?, Mason Glaves wrote of his frustration with the status of Java Media Framework. Hung up on unfixed bugs and the lack of rival implementations of the spec, he writes:
At this point Sun really needs to consider taking action. Either they need to begin active development on the RI again, or they need to come out, officially, and tell the world that they have dropped...

In scoping out various performance related projects for mustang we wanted to tackle one of Swing's long standing problem areas that has contributed to bad perceived performance. That is, when a Swing based app is exposed after being hidden by another application there is a noticeable delay between when the background of the window is erased and when the actual contents are painted. We've come...

Ray Gans, Peter Kessler and Kelly O'Hair will be in a chat room on April 19 at 10:00 AM PDT at http://java.sun.com/developer/community/chat/ answering questions about the JDK collection of projects (AKA Project Peabody). The JDK collection of projects is an initiative to provide a more collaborative development environment for the J2SE Platform.
We invite you send in questions either during the...